A data center is a facility used to house computing systems and associated components. Data centers may include racks to store computing systems, elevated floors, cable runways, cooling systems, power systems, security systems, and the like. Many of the computing systems housed in a data center can be stored on server racks, which may be arranged in rows forming corridors therebetween. Current data center design may be based on a client-server computing model to provide, for instance, Internet connectivity and/or solutions for systems operation.
New data centers may generally take the form of either brick and mortar or containerized. A brick and mortar data center can include a number of buildings or additions to an existing building, which house the data center. A new brick and mortar data center may be designed and built according to a specific customer demand. New brick and mortar data centers may come with a significant initial capital expenditure to provide for the design, provisioning, and construction of the new brick and mortar data center. New brick and mortar data centers may take approximately 9 to 24 months to design and build (e.g., depending upon a size of the data center).
A containerized data center can provide a more timely and cost effective solution. Containerized data centers may be prefabricated mass produced and may be shipped to a customer (e.g., by ships and trucks). However, containerized data centers may be unappealing in that they may provide, or may be perceived to provide, a short-term, low reliability solution without considering long-term needs for an organization served by the data center. Furthermore, as organizations continue to rethink fiscal expenditures for data centers, containerized approaches, while including lower initial capital expenditures than brick and mortar facilities, may be perceived as wasteful due to the real or perceived short-term solution they offer.
Brick and mortar data centers designed and built according to some previous approaches were generally non-scalable and built with one goal in mind, therefore limited with respect to flexibility. However, such brick and mortar data centers could provide a traditional data center environment with some creature comforts that are not afforded by the use of containerized data centers. Such containerized data centers may take a minimalist approach (e.g., by installing server racks in a containerized solution that provides for rapid deployment with little to no creature comforts). Brick and mortar data centers still account for a majority of the market, while containerized data centers are gaining a foothold in the market of fast deployment and/or the market of 5-year strategies with tech-refresh in mind.